Clive Head is widely considered one of the leading realist painters of his generation. In the upcoming exhibition, Clive Head: Zoetic-Realism, Hollis Taggart Galleries will present a selection of works, on canvas and paper, to launch the artist's association with the gallery. This is the first solo exhibition to bring a substantial body of Head's recent work together - twenty-four paintings, drawings and etchings will be displayed in the exhibition.
Born in England, in Maidstone, Kent, Head has garnered much acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic over the many decades of his career. This exhibition, aptly titled, bears witness to the way Head capture life around him. His highly complex compositions of human activities are zoetic and energized. And, unlike past Photorealists, Head does not reveal a single moment frozen in time. Instead, with deft ability, he captures multiple perspectives with multiple concurrent timelines, moving through time and space. These fragmented urban depictions, most often with figures are in essence time-lapsed compilations. The compositions are highly engaging and immediately fascinate the observer. Time seems to come to a kaleidoscopic halt on his canvases and his subjects are masterfully rendered.
Seen against Head's forerunners such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud, and of his contemporaries such as Peter Doig, it was clear that Head had established a unique position in the contemporary arena. In one of the show's highlights, Les Souvenirs du Cafe Anglais the artist characteristically fractures a scene from his familiar environment. The painting, which was previously shown in, REALITY: Modern and Contemporary British Painting, is simultaneously a study in motion and stillness, tantalizing the viewer. Similarly Summer Ark, Wash Doy with Actaeon and Siddol's Ferry are based on observations from the rural Yorkshire village in the North of England.
A child prodigy beginning his instruction at the Reeds Art Club at the age of eleven, Head later attended Aberystwyth University. In 1994, he became Chair of the Fine Art Department at the University of York, lecturing on method, theory and art history. He also began participating in exhibitions throughout the UJ<., Europe and America. He was commissioned in 2005 to create a painting of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth. In 2010, Head was invited by the National Gallery in London to show three large-scale paintings of the city; the exhibition drawing record attendance and receiving myriad accolades.
This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Landau Fine Art and a joint hard-covered exhibition catalogue is available with an essay by Colin Wiggins the former Special Projects Coordinator at the National Gallery, London. He curated Head's exhibition Clive Head: Modern Perspectives at the National Gallery in 2010.

The faces are melting in Kenny Scharf’s new paintings. “Things are disintegrating,” he says, “I am reacting to our increasingly out-of-control situation.” Scharf’s work continues to be infused by his inexhaustible optimism and his sense of fun but there has always been an engagement with profound issues beneath the façade. Ecology, the environment, and capitalist excess have long been central themes. More recently, his paintings have shown his alarm over the effects of petroleum and the mountains of nondegradable plastic that are produced from it.

Scharf’s work has always combined and contrasted the pop culture he absorbed growing up in Los Angeles with the important innovations in modern and contemporary art. His earlier work fused Dali and Disney. More recently, he has been in dialogue with Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. In the new work, he merges his distinct style with color field and stain painting. “I like to connect with every movement in 20th-century art,” Scharf explains. “I make new hybrids, taking it all in and putting it in a blender.”

A distinctive style is something that Scharf admires in other artists and from the beginning has tried to achieve in his own work. He believes in art as an expression of individual identity. From his first mature work as a student at the School of Visual Arts, a painting by Kenny Scharf was instantly recognizable. Still adhering to his signature style, he continuously invents new forms.
Scharf is very enthusiastic about his new “sloppy style” that characterizes the major paintings in the exhibition. Rows of faces disintegrate into colorful drips reminiscent of both New York School painting and the serial imagery of minimal art. In these new works, Scharf is striving to create clear and simple forms that resonate with meaning. He feels liberated and excited, adding that “it is so much fun.”

The expression of emotion in art is essential to Scharf. Art that is cold leaves him cold. He explains that cartoon faces can express emotion with abstract power. Like his artistic colleagues from his early years in New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Scharf studied cartoons as a way to intensify figurative expression.
It is his early downtown history that brings Scharf back to New York this October. The Museum of Modern Art is opening an exhibition on the seminal performance space Club 57 in which Scharf played a central role. Watching him paint, one can see how his experience as a backup dancer for Klaus Nomi and his other performative roles have shaped his approach to his work. One side of his painting practice is detailed and meticulous to the extreme. The other side is tremendously physical and requires him to use his body like a dancer.

Visitors to Scharf’s Los Angeles studio are greeted by a hundred or more discarded plastic toys in his yard and on his roof. During the early part of his career, Scharf found his art materials in the garbage. To this day, he still stops his car when he finds plastic toys and TV sets thrown away on the street. These discarded plastic objects have inspired the two other bodies of work featured in the show: his Assemblage Vivant Tableaux Plastiques, and his TV Bax. The assemblage works, which are inspired by the Nouveau Realistes, are constructed from his stock of recycled plastic toys. The TV Bax are painted on the plastic backs of discarded television sets. Like the toys, the TV backs have a disconcerting anthropomorphic quality. Scharf wonders if their anonymous designers created these plastic covers, which are different for every model, to resemble a face.

Scharf finds these thrown-away toys and TV backs to be poignant objects, resonant with emotion. “Each of these objects carries a story,” Scharf explains. He thinks about how people might have struggled and sacrificed to buy these toys and TVs, and about the intense relationship that children and families have with them. Scharf resurrects the lives of these inanimate objects in his work. He also notes that garbage keeps changing with technology. The backs of TV sets used to have large protruding “noses.” Now they are flatter and more similar to a canvas.

Since his childhood, Scharf has been fascinated by outer space. Space travel and the portrayal of infinite space have long been central themes. In his life and in his work, he tries to eliminate boundaries and borders. As he pursues his dialogue with the great painters of the New York School, he is increasingly preoccupied with the inner space of painting. His exploration of inner space creates a dynamic tension with his passion for outer space. With his characteristic exuberance and his moral voice, Scharf reformulates his unique combination of Pollock and Pop to create a vibrant new body of work.

In her latest exhibition, Shirazeh Houshiary investigates the friction between the conscious and unconscious, control and chance, reflecting on the physical and immaterial qualities that shape art and human life. Bringing together new paintings and sculpture — including her largest painting to date, a triptych of more than eight metres in width — Nothing is deeper than the skin marks the artist’s first show with Lisson in New York, and her ninth exhibition with the gallery.

Skin functions as a membrane, a barrier but also a soft boundary between the human body and the outer world. It is the conduit to the primeval sense of touch — the first line of defence against friction and conflict – but equally it is exposed to warmth, light and the pleasure of embrace. The works in Nothing is deeper than skin explore the complex relationship between the interior and the exterior, manifesting permeability and flux in their mercurial surfaces composed of pigment, pencil, aluminium and glass.

Whilst an intricate and involved process is a recognised feature of Houshiary’s work, in the new paintings she introduces an unparalleled level of chance. To create these paintings, a mixture of water and pigment is poured onto the surface of the canvas to produce an enigmatic ground punctuated by pooling sediment and irregular apertures. Over this layer, the artist’s hand is introduced through rigorous mark-making, in some paintings manifesting as words — Houshiary’s frequent pairing of an affirmation and a denial — and in others as lines creating a steady abstraction that radiates its own frequency and energy.

In new sculptures comprised of a twisting arrangement of glass bricks, Houshiary further explores the notion of transparency and the possibility of transcending three-dimensional space. Each brick, whilst an essential element in the construction of the work, also functions as a sign of absence or void, suggesting the quality of boundlessness. The sculptures’ helical forms, created through the careful rotation of each layer at precise angles to produce a spiralling effect, are at once vigorous and evanescent, their materiality appearing to stretch and pull into infinite space, exemplifying the interplay between form and formlessness that is the essential tension of Houshiary’s work.

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Arches, Dean Levin's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition marks the next phase in Levin’s investigations of form, space, and material, as he frees his convex paintings from the confines of the wall and re-contextualizes them within the vocabulary of sculpture. Arches features Levin’s first large-scale sculptural installation, inspired by the classical form of the arch, alongside a series of new paintings.

Levin’s practice has been characterized by a deep engagement with the monochrome, extending Minimalist thinking and aesthetics to explore its behaviors and implications on objects in both two and three dimensional space. His interrelated series, including his wooden line sculptures, mirrored panels, and convex paintings, emphasize the profound impact of subtle gestures on the ways in which objects are perceived and experienced. This is particularly enhanced by the modular nature of his works, and the use of matte finishes, which further highlight fine imperfections produced in the process of their making. Levin also activates his works by using the physicality of the environments in which they are presented to identify a set of parameters that dictate, in part, their creation. In this way, Levin develops a layered conceptual and physical experience that builds on itself.

With his upcoming exhibition, Levin engages in a direct dialogue with one of architecture’s most classical forms—the arch—re-envisioning it as a sculptural object with independent agency. While many architectural styles and ornamentations have been developed and disposed of through time, structural components—like arches—have remained, carrying a historic nostalgia and an ongoing contemporary relevance within both artistic and architectural lexicons. Constructed from a set of black matte convex panels, Levin’s arches appear to gently undulate as the viewer moves closer and further from them and through and around them, creating a dynamic set of relationships between the overarching structure, space, and viewer, as well as among the individual panels.

Each panel is made through Levin’s distinct process of pouring fiberglass-reinforced plaster into framed Lycra, and allowing gravity to shape an organic convex form. He then paints the panels with a very thin oil, diluted substantially by turpentine, to produce a matte finish. This process allows for natural imperfections that suggest the originality of the artist’s hand, defying the expected uniformity and mass production of building materials. Likewise, the use of the panels challenges the commonly understood function of the arch as load bearing, as the panels appear at once flat and three-dimensional, confusing perceptions of their depth and weight and intensifying the role of the viewer in defining the work.

The presentation of the arch is augmented by a series of new paintings that depict a range of exterior and interior architectural views. Rendered first digitally and then transferred onto the canvas, the paintings play with the gradation and weight of color and line, with some portions highly defined and others washed out to near nothingness. The paintings pull Levin’s play with depth and three-dimensionality back into the two-dimensional frame, creating a concave complement to the primary sculptural installation in the exhibition. Together, the works immerse the viewer in an encompassing, perception-bending experience.

New York-based artist Dean Levin’s (b. 1988) background in architecture informs his study of light, color, and space through sculpture, painting and installation. Levin’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery/The Box, London; Bill Brady Gallery, Kansas City, MO; and Robert Blumenthal Gallery, NY. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Stark, NY; Luhring Augustine, NY; The National Exemplar Gallery, NY; COMA Gallery, Rushcutters Bay, Australia; and Super Dakota, Brussels, Belgium, among others. He holds a Bachelors in Architecture from Pratt Institute in New York. Levin was born in Johannesburg, grew up in California, and now lives and works in Brooklyn.

Arches will be on view from November 2 through December 22, 2017 at the Gallery’s 509 West 24th Street location. For more information about Dean Levin, please contact Gallery Director Mary Mitsch at mary@boeskygallery.com or 212.680.9889. For exhibit press inquiries, please contact Alina Sumajin, PAVE Communications and Consulting, at alina@paveconsult.com or 646.369.2050.

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce The People’s Cries, an exhibition of new work by Jessica Jackson Hutchins. The exhibition—the artist’s second solo show with the gallery—advances her recent explorations in stained and fused glass. The People’s Cries will feature two 40 foot-long skylights filled with Hutchins’ fused glass panels, as well as a number of sculptural floor pieces incorporating both glass and ceramic.

Known for transforming household objects into dynamic sculptural installations through the addition of ceramics, paint, and found materials, Hutchins’ practice examines the artistic potential of the everyday. In her mixed-media assemblages, Hutchins uses quotidian objects and creates collages from ordinary detritus, selecting and arranging the materials to articulate and accentuate their inherent emotional and narrative content. Rather than sentimentalizing skill or private labor in the studio, the work instead champions the latent qualities and common uses of materials, refiguring them in often playful and unexpected ways that surprise and provoke the viewer while eliciting a sense of recognition and at times unsettling familiarity.

In this new body of work, Hutchins furthers her exploration of the mutual existence of art and daily life through glass. The imagery in her windows and sculptures, inspired by rock song lyrics, resistance symbols, phrases seen on placards at protests, and a range of other sources, reflects on and embodies the emotions evoked by recent news as well as historical opposition movements. These source elements emerge organically as Hutchins works and shapes the glass, getting lost in the process of making. The resultant pieces have a sensory and psychologically-charged quality—the physical manifestations of the artist’s response to the tumultuous social and political dynamics of the day.

Hutchins’ experimental approach extends and subverts our expectations of the material possibilities of glass, demonstrating the contemporary and political potential of a medium that is often seen as traditional and decorative. In Hutchins’ hands, illuminated glass, usually associated with religious iconography and formulaic patterning, offers instead a vibrant and engaging montage of individual and collective protest. Experienced through both natural and artificial light, portraits of activists like Angela Davis and phrases such as “Power Up” and “Mercy for the Innocent” are imbued with a spiritual presence, refracting the language of resistance—the “people’s cries”—throughout the gallery.

Hutchins became interested in working with stained glass following a visit to an abandoned Christian Science Church in Pendleton, Oregon while scouting locations for the 2016 Portland Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner. The church’s stained glass oculus was missing three out of eight panels, and Hutchins was inspired to fill in the gaps with new glass works. Having never worked with the material before, the usually ceramic and paint-based artist collaborated with a stained glass fabricator to translate her drawings and designs into glass. This experience motivated Hutchins to pursue further study of the medium, and she soon received a six-month residency at the Bullseye Glass Studio in her home base of Portland, Oregon.

While at Bullseye, Hutchins began to experiment with glass techniques. Rather than leading glass together – as is typically done to make stained glass – the artist uses a process called glass fusing. Using a scoring tool, Hutchins cuts sheets of colored glass by hand and then layers and arranges them to create compositions, adding paint and glass bits to create detail and texture. This glass is then fired in a kiln and melted together, resulting in a slightly blended effect. Displaying the breadth of the artist’s experimentation with the material, The People’s Cries includes fused glass windows, door fragments, and free-standing sculptures.

“I found myself working in this beautiful new medium at the time when the political climate in the United States was beginning to change drastically,” said Hutchins. “I believe it is part of my job to be able to expose a raw nerve to whatever our culture is suffering through and let all that into the work; the beauty and pain and the outrage. The sensory extravagance (the gorgeousness!) of colored light was as overwhelming as the political upheavals and injustices. The presence of light embodied by color really does create a kind of hallowed space. So that perhaps, this could be the salve of hopefulness that we need right now.”

—

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971 in Chicago) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Hutchins’ expressive and intuitive studio practice produces dynamic sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics that often transform everyday household objects such as furniture and clothing. Hutchins has recently had solo exhibitions at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH (2016); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2014); the Hepworth Wakefield Museum (2013); the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA (2011). Significant group exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace (2013) and The Whitney Biennial (2010). Her work has been incorporated into public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland. Hutchins holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hutchins will be included in the forthcoming publication, Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art published by Phaidon.

The People’s Cries will be on view from November 2 through December 22, 2017 at the Gallery’s 507 West 24th Street location. For more information about Jessica Jackson Hutchins, please contact Gallery Director Kelly Woods at kelly@boeskygallery.com or 212.680.9889. For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska, PAVE Communications and Consulting, at aga@paveconsult.com or 646.369.2050.

On 2 November 2017, Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Fifth Avenue location
Beauty, an exhibition of new paintings by TOMOO GOKITA.

From his early work in graphic design and artist books, Tomoo Gokita evolved a distinctive manner of painting that incorporated a wide variety of brush marks and a range of shades between black and white. His raffish subjects seemed to have been lifted from reproductions in bygone detective novels, Hollywood tabloids, and wanted posters. In Mature, a new series of portrait paintings exhibited here, Gokita depicts women “of a certain age” who appear to have posed for a fetish magazine. Without the distortions and grotesquerie of his earlier works, Gokita portrays these enigmatic characters naturalistically as unconventional objects of desire, treating his subjects with obvious contemplation and admiration.

Gokita's gift of observation is apparent in a surprising new series of Fake Cezanne
paintings. At once Realist homage and Conceptual card trick, these would seem to be faithful renditions of Cezanne still-lifes, yet by rendering the images in lush halftones, Gokita evokes grainy, nostalgic reproductions in vintage art journals rather than original masterpieces.

Tomoo Gokita was born in 1969 in Tokyo, Japan, where he continues to live and work. In 2014, the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, Japan, organized a major survey of his work. This will be his third solo exhibition
with Mary Boone Gallery.

The exhibition, at 745 Fifth Avenue, is on view through 22 December 2017.
For further information, please contact Ron Warren at the Gallery,
or visit our website www.maryboonegallery.com.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Gary Hume: Mum, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The show features thirteen recent paintings, each on aluminum or paper. This is Hume’s first exhibition of new work in New York in four years.

This body of work focuses on a range of subjects, but at its core is a suite of highly personal paintings about memory and loss. Hume’s mother is 86 years old and suffers from dementia. And while the ostensible subjects of many of the new paintings are flowers, their titles — Mourning, Spent, Blind — reflect Hume’s thoughts of her. Mum on the Couch (2017), a more direct portrait, depicts the artist’s aging mother in her current condition, a poignant contrast to the vibrant woman of her son’s memories.

In addition to Hume’s signature aluminum panels, he recently began painting on large sheets of paper. His preferred paint, a highly reflective household gloss, creates textures and reflections on the paper that become an integral part of the work. As Alexander Nagel writes in the exhibition catalogue, “Apparitions of shifting light and shade playing over the surface, we are always part of their subject matter.”

The catalogue, featuring large-scale color reproductions of over thirty paintings, has been published in conjunction with Sprüth Magers, London.

Gary Hume (b. 1962) lives and works in London and Accord, New York. He has been represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery since 1991. He represented Britain at the São Paulo Biennial in 1996 and the Venice Biennale in 1999. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and most recently Tate Britain in London.

Gary Hume: Mum is on view at 522 West 22nd Street from November 4 to December 22, 2017, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Katharina Fritsch, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. Featuring seven new sculptures, it is the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since 2008.

Fritsch’s sculpture often begins with a familiar image, which she subverts with shifts in scale and color. The exhibition opens with three such objects greatly enlarged: a lantern in pink and black; an egg, half in yellow and half in orange; and an enormous human skull in white. In the second room are a purple spinning wheel, an oversize blue strawberry, and a large red and white snake.

In 2010 art historian Jean-Pierre Criqui wrote about Fritsch’s depictions of animals: “The way the artist uses them, but also the situations in which she places them, gives them ambiguous powers at the intersection of several tendencies: humanity’s ancestral fears and superstitions, as expressed, for example, in tales and legends; the intensities of totemic thought and of its images; and the uncanny and Freudian dream study.”

In the exhibition’s third room is a bronze sculpture of a cowry shell. Standing almost ten feet tall and painted in a bright pale green, it towers over the viewer. Fritsch first used this shape in pale pink as a component of her 2004 sculpture Woman with Dog. Now isolated and greatly enlarged, the shell engages the viewer’s body directly, its serrated aperture both inviting and menacing, while its matte-green finish transforms the organic form into something disquietingly unfamiliar.

As Fritsch explained in a 2002 interview, “I find this game between reality and vision very interesting. I think my work moves backwards and forwards between these two poles. There is still the connection to the real, but at the same time to the unreal.”

Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956) lives in Düsseldorf. She represented Germany at the 1995 Venice Biennale and has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at museums across Europe and the United States, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and, most recently, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Her monumental outdoor sculpture Hahn/Cock (2013), originally exhibited in London's Trafalgar Square, is currently on view at the Walker and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Katharina Fritsch is on view at 523 West 24th Street from November 4 to December 22, 2017, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Nayland Blake #IDrawEveryDay, the next exhibition in his gallery at 526 West 22nd Street, featuring one sculpture and over seventy drawings in graphite and colored pencil.

On January 1, 2015, Nayland Blake initiated an assignment to make at least one drawing every day. Drawing had been part of Blake’s artistic practice for decades, often in tandem with sculpture, but these daily drawings would become the artist’s most diaristic body of work to date. Within a consistent format of twelve by nine inches, the drawings capture a range of moods and themes, but their central concern is gender presentation. Blake has harnessed the medium to create a fantasy body whose changeability is matched by the fluidity of the drawn line, which can exist as words, patterns, imagery, or all three simultaneously.

A banner in one drawing reads “WRITING & DRAWING ARE SISTER ARTS.” The phrase, found in a book of nineteenth-century penmanship exercises and recently tattooed across the artist’s back, signals a commitment to text and image, as well as the visual influence of vernacular tattoo art. Other inspirations include classic comic strips like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Bud Sagendorf’s Popeye, old Warner Bros. cartoons, Lynda Barry’s illustrated novels, contemporary animated series like Adventure Time and Steven Universe, and recent autobiographical zine comics. Blake compares the drawings in this exhibition to the visual accumulation on urban walls covered with stickers, signage, and graffiti: “Drawings allow for internal contradiction. They can be something one minute and something else the next.”

Blake’s drawing are also featured in the exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” on view at the New Museum in New York through January 21. On the afternoons of November 11, December 1 and 16, and January 13, the museum will host Crossing Object (inside Gnomen), a performance by Blake in character as the “fursona” Gnomen, a friendly bison/bear of unfixed gender.

Nayland Blake (b. 1960) is an interdisciplinary artist living in New York. Blake’s work has been shown extensively since 1990, most recently in a one-person exhibition at the David Ireland House in San Francisco. Blake participated in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and the 1993 Venice Biennale, and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

Nayland Blake #IDrawEveryDay is on view at 526 West 22nd Street from November 4 to December 22, 2017, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Jim Shaw’s exhibition of paintings and sculpture at Metro Pictures is the influential artist’s first in New York since his 2015 New Museum survey “The End is Here,” in which he exhibited an immersive installation; his idiosyncratic paintings, drawings and sculpture; his exalted collection of thrift store paintings (first shown at Metro Pictures in 1991); and densely accumulated oddball religious ephemera. An icon of the Los Angeles art scene, he is associated with a generation of artists that includes Mike Kelley, John Miller and Tony Oursler, all of whom studied at Cal Arts in the 1970s.

Rendered in exquisite detail, Shaw’s virtuosic work combines his analysis of the political, social and spiritual histories of the United States with contemplative reflections of his own psyche. For more than three decades he has examined art history, comic books, subcultural undergrounds and consumer products—to name only a few of his wide-ranging fields of interest—to articulate a distinct visual language that charts the country’s ever-shifting sociopolitical landscape.

The paintings in this exhibition incorporate symbols and characters of the past to comment on our fraught present. Using imagery drawn from Old Testament stories, pagan myths and satirical cartoons, Shaw relies on his encyclopedic knowledge to visualize our common vernacular. His layered symbology reads like an exaggerated mirror of our hyper-mediated, “post-truth” reality. These allusions to biblical prophecies and pulp imagery speak to the effects this bellicose time has on our collective subconscious. Shaw’s Ms. Universe refers to the mythological tale of the rape of Europa, famously depicted by Titian and countless artists throughout history, in which the titular Phoenician woman is abducted by Zeus in disguise as a bull. In Shaw’s interpretation of the scene, Zeus appears as an alpha male centaur bull wearing a modern business suit and checking his wristwatch. Walking along a beach he approaches Europa, who has washed ashore wearing a pageant dress and a Miss Universe sash, her face obscured by a swirling galaxy divinely emanating from her torso.

The first comprehensive presentation in Los Angeles of Shaw's work is on view at the Marciano Art Foundation through January 13. ”Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw” will be on view November 18 through February 25, 2018, at the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. On December 6, Shaw’s band D'red D'warf will perform at Soundscape Park as part of Art Basel Miami Beach’s public programming. He has had additional one-person shows at Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; BALTIC Centre for the Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain, Bordeaux; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His work has been included in the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, SITE Sante Fe Biennial and the Biennale of Sydney.

Galeria Nara Roesler | New York presents Theory of the Inevitable Convergence, an exhibition of works by Carlito
Carvalhosa, Artur Lescher, and Marco Maggi that highlights untapped points of convergence between the narratives of the three artists.
In addition to formal artistic intersections, the chosen works evoke important questions that the three artists have
recurrently posed to the public, including the ways in which their works relate to the surrounding space, be it through interference and disruption or through suggesting an unknown place, linked or not to the physical realm. The works thus invite the viewer to experience new circumstances and, perhaps, rethink their relationship to the world around them.
Arthur Lescher presents Finials, small sculptures on pedestals meant to reference architectural structures: the apse of a church or temple, a corporate building, or—as the artist ironically puts it—the tip of a missile, evoking the power and eloquence of man. Also on display are the artist’s Pendulums, which resemble vibrating instruments and magnetic sources, sensitive to the disturbances of the space around them as well as the transient state of the observer. Subject to the force of gravity, the pendulums could act as instruments of an invisible writing, incessantly suggesting a new history/memory for both the space in which they are situated and the works that surround them. Carlito Carvalhosa’s installation, in turn, comprises oils on mirrored aluminum, hanging or leaning against tubular lamps symmetrically arranged on the wall. The mirrored pieces offer a singular experience: the viewer is prevented from seeing his/her full reflection, only able to experience it partially or in a distorted manner due to the almost fully painted surfaces. Given the current social context, in which everyone constantly sees and shares images of themselves on different networks, Carvalhosa’s installation triggers a strange feeling within the viewer, who instantly pauses and enters something of a “non-place,” where the lack of narrative can be disconcerting.
Marco Maggi presents Podium, a triptych of three panels, each a different size and color—gold, silver, and bronze.
To create the work, the artist precisely and delicately carved signs into metallic sheets, which he then placed inside slide frames. Although the title and colors immediately suggest a narrative, when approaching the work, the viewer realizes that each slide offers a unique abstract image that has the ability to gain different meanings. In the words of the artist: “If there is no complicity with the spectator, the work does not exist.” He goes on to say, “When people ask me what I do, what my profession is, I answer that I am a promoter of pauses.” Podium is therefore an invitation to another temporality, creating the opportunity to lose oneself and get carried away by the abstract narrative of the artist.
The formality and rigor present in Maggi’s delicate geometric creation is also present in Lescher’s works, throughout their precise forms, which lack excess. These forms, composed of essentially reflective surfaces, in turn find a counterpoint in Carvalhosa’s painted aluminum while at the same time circling back to Maggi, who poses the same questions through his carvings in metallic sheets.
Using these convergences as starting points while simultaneously allowing the differences between their works to shine through, the artists invite the public to discover new possibilities and routes. In Maggi’s words, “We deserve a pause, and an insignificant drawing can work as a perfect training ground to increase our capacity to live in an illegible context.” Lescher emphasizes that “it is the flow of thought in its various states of perception that builds the senses. A cyclical form of time finds its place.” Carvalhosa concludes, “In the garden of the paths that bifurcate, there is the Theory of the Inevitable Convergence!”

About Artur Lescher
Artur Lescher (b. 1962, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo. For more than thirty years, Lescher presents a solid work as a sculptor, which results from a research around the articulation of materials, thoughts and forms. In this sense, the artist has on the particular, uninterrupted and precise dialogue with both architectonic space and design, and on his choice of materials, which can be metal, stone, wood, felt, salts, brass and copper, fundamental elements to highlight the power of this discourse. According to the Art Historian Matthieu Poirier “The main quality of Artur Lescher’s pared-down, finely crafted works is that they produce a tangible field force—a magnetic field, one might say, considering the metals he uses [...] But it is, above all, a perceptual matter.” Even if Lescher's work is strongly linked to industrial processes, achieving extreme refinement and rigor, his production does not have the form as the only purpose, actually, it goes beyond it. This contradiction opens space for myth and imagination, essential elements for the construction of his Minimal Landscape (Galeria Nara Roesler, 2006). By choosing names for his artworks, such as Rio Máquina, Metamérico or Inabsência (Projeto Octógono, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2012) Lescher proposes an extension of the work, suggesting a narrative, sometimes contradictory or provocative, that places the spectator in a hiatus, in a suspended condition. Artur Lescher participated in the 2005 edition of the Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil and in the 1987 and 2002 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo. He took part in several exhibitions in Latin America, Europe and in the United States, as well as in two solo shows, one at the Palais d'Iéna (2017), in Paris, and the other one at Instituto Tomie Ohtake (2006), in São Paulo.

About Carlito Carvalhosa
Carlito Carvalhosa(b. 1961, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Recognized widely throughout Brazil, he emerged in the Brazilian art scene in the 1980s as a member of the São Paulo based collective Grupo Casa 7, alongside Rodrigo Andrade, Fabio Miguez, Nuno Ramos and Paulo Monteiro, period in which he produced large paintings with emphasis on the pictorial gesture. For more than twenty years the artist has been using diverse mediums and many kinds of objects—including electric lights, fabric, wax, wood and mirrors—to explore architectural space, the nature of materials in abstract forms and the spectator’s response to all of them. According to Portuguese curator Marta Mestre, what interests the artist is “the relationship between space and the act of building. Mobilized by the artist, the building is a process of reordering the world, supporting its chaos, thus, differentiating the activity in face of nature”. In addition, Mestre emphasizes that through Carvalhosa’s artworks “lies the thought of sculpture as construction, adding gesture and removing the void.” These observations are clear in Carvalhosa’s recent works, such as Sum of Days (2011), a monumental site-specific installation for the MoMA’s atrium, and Sala de Espera (2013) installed at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, in which throughout the space, twenty-four wooden street posts were suspended in dialogue with Niemeyer’s architecture. Carvalhosa exhibited at the Havana Biennial, Cuba (in 1986 and 2012); the Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2001 and 2009); and the 18th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1985). Some of his recent solo shows took place at Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2013); Projeto Contentores, Guimarães, Portugal (2012) and MoMA, New York, USA (2011).

About Marco Maggi
Marco Maggi (b. 1957, Montevideo, Uruguay) lives and works in New York and Montevideo. The presence of paper and the artisanal way of dealing with it are two constants in the work of Marco Maggi, even in his large installations. His creations, such as Global Myopia (Uruguayan Pavillion at the 56th Biennale di Venezia), encourage the public to slow down the pace, paying attention to the works in order to be able to get inside of them, unfolding its possible meanings, rethinking the surroundings and the society in which they live in. Regarding Global Myopia, Maggi states that: “far from a very twentieth-century attitude, in which it was expected to have solutions for everybody and always, nowadays, I believe that hopes are small and revealed with proximity. Myopic attitude, which is when you look at something and you place it closely in order to look slowly and attentively”. He exhibited his works at the Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador (2011); the 17th Guatemala Biennial (2010); the 29th Pontevedra Biennial, Spain (2006); the 8th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2003); and the 25th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2002). His recent solo shows took place at MOLAA - Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, USA (2013); Vassar College Museum, New York, USA (2013); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil (2012); Dorsky Museum, New York, USA (2011).

NEW YORK – Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a one-person exhibition of major works by Michael Hurson (1941-2007). Hurson, who exhibited with the gallery from the mid-1970s until his untimely death, was an artist whose drawings, paintings, sculptures and texts constantly mirrored his personal life. He embraced his surroundings; Hurson painted and drew the people and objects around him. The exhibition will be on view at 521 West 21st Street from November 30th through December 22nd, 2017. There will be an opening reception from 6 to 8pm on Thursday, November 30th.

From September 7–December 22, 2017, Assembly’s public storefront gallery will host Project al-Khwarizmi (PAK) POP-UP Workshop, a project by Stephanie Dinkins devoted to exposing pervasive forms of digital discrimination and offering means of working against these inequities. Similar to Recess’s seasoned Session program in Soho, which allows artists to pursue works in progress in a public setting, Assembly grants participating artists the opportunity to activate and add to the space cumulatively, working toward an evolving installation rather than a static exhibition.

Central to PAK POP-UP Workshop is an investigation of algorithms—precise, reusable sets of steps developed for computers to accomplish tasks. Algorithms are the building blocks that make up digital communication systems, medical records archives, and business operations software (among other structures). More generally, anyone who surfs the internet or uses intelligent personal assistants like Siri or Alexa comes into contact with algorithms whose outcomes range from ranked search findings to targeted advertisements in their most harmless forms. While these results might seem to be objectively generated, algorithms can produce content that reinforces systemic inequities. For example, low-income individuals might receive notifications for high-interest loans online, or Siri might harbor racial biases about its user.

Throughout PAK POP-UP Workshop, Dinkins will create opportunities for visitors to isolate and study algorithmic systems in order to consider how the biases ingrained within them impact our daily lives and mold our histories. In particular, the project will include a video installation documenting the artist’s interactions with the social robot Bina48, a workstation and confessional in which visitors can trace and explore the ways in which digital discrimination arises, and schematics of the algorithmic systems that perpetuate racial and socioeconomic biases. Across these components, PAK POP-UP Workshop will endeavor to empower individuals to recognize and intercept moments in which our personal traits are identified, flattened, and used against for or against us by emergent technologies.

In addition to her work on PAK POP-UP Workshop in the gallery space, Dinkins will participate as a guest teaching artist during the educational diversion programs, and she will collaborate with lead teaching artist Leonardo to incorporate material from her project into the program’s curriculum. Dinkins will also guide program participants in creating final projects that, once complete, will appear alongside her work in the storefront gallery.

Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present Inside The Nest, a group exhibition curated by Embajada. Conditions of post-colonialism, inherited and passed through generations, oral stories, traditions, and the fabrication of objects are invoked by each of the six artists in the show as a means to reclaim their particular cultural heritage. According to the late poet, writer and theorist Edouard Glissant, culture is never a finished product, referring to syncretism as a blend or attempted combination of different religions, cultures or school of thought.

Through mapping, documenting and employing artisanal techniques, Jorge González’s ongoing pedagogical research serves as a platform for the recuperation of marginalized vernacular culture in an attempt to produce new narratives incorporating the indigenous and the modern. These projects exist as a mobile program through conversations, workshops, exhibitions, and publications such as the inaugural release of the Herramientos Generosas, vol 3, a collaborative publication between González, editor Michy Marchaux, and designer Olga Casellas, exploring gaps in local historical and cultural narratives.

Working across sculpture, installation and site-specific interventions, Engel Leonardo addresses issues related to climate, nature, traditional crafts, architecture and popular culture of the Caribbean. Of particular interest in his work is the production of objects, and their embedded psychological and sociological functions. The series of sculptures, made with local mud and guayacán, refer to icons from the Dominican Republic – faceless dolls created in the Higüerito region by a community of artisans in the 1970s.

For the past several years, Claudia Peña Salinas has been doing research about Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue, the male and female Aztec deities of rain and fertility, in an ongoing body of work composed of sculpture, images, installation, and video. Her practice is centered on visits to Mexico, where she was born and raised; through the process of travel, documentation, research and collection of ephemera, Peña Salinas constructs a poetic narrative, which is at the same time personal and political.

Mapas del Cerro continues Chemi Rosado-Seijo’s long-term collaboration with El Cerro, a rural community embedded in the mountains of Naranjito, Puerto Rico. Initiated in 2002, through negotiation and collaboration the residents painted the exteriors of homes in different shades of green, paying homage to the way the community has built in harmony with the topography of the mountains where it stands. In preparing the surface of the walls they scratched and peeled off layers of paint from years of accumulation, which were later brought into the studio to be examined and repurposed.

Beau Dick was an artist who took much of his inspiration and technique from Kwakwaka’wakw traditions embracing contemporary influences into his sculptures. Beau was born and raised in a small village in Canada’s northwest coast which, because of its geographic isolation, became a sanctuary from the federal government’s ban on indigenous Potlatch customs, in place until 1951. Tapping into the collective memory of his community, Beau actively perpetuated ceremonial traditions, creating transformative masks of mythical Kwakwaka’wakw folklore. Carving and ceremony were both equal parts of his practice, the masks becoming evidence of ongoing and living cultural practices.

Clement Siatous was forcibly displaced, along with the entire population of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean, by the UK Government to make way for a US military base where it remains today. In order to politically support the eviction, both governments involved created a fiction that an indigenous population had never existed. Siatous renders a counterpoint to official and traditional modes of record in direct response to this continued government denial. Depicting narrative scenes from memory Siatous constructs a comprehensive chronicle of life on the islands. Through his practice he reclaims ownership of his own history, while becoming a voice for his community in defying their culture’s eradication.

Embajada is a gallery and curatorial project founded in 2015 by Christopher Rivera and Manuela Paz, located in the neighborhood of Hato Rey in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Inspired by the idea to exist as a diplomatic mission, the project aims to create a political context through the use of aesthetic information and driven by collaborative spirit.

Taka Ishii Gallery New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by New York-based photographer Lynn Stern from November 30 to December 22. This exhibition, her first with Taka Ishii Gallery New York, will include her early “Skull” series produced in 1991 almost in its entirety. Artists throughout history have been in thrall to the depiction of death. Stern has made that fascination the focal point of a 25-year exploration of the subject. The resulting book, SKULL, reproduces 8 series of skull photographs, many never before presented, and includes an accompanying essay by renowned art critic, Donald Kuspit, contextualizing Stern’s work within art history through comparisons with paintings, sculptures and photographs made during the last seven centuries of western art. Stern has also contributed an essay describing in personal terms the evolution of the skull series. This publication will be available at Taka Ishii Gallery New York during the Stern exhibition.

The early “Skull” works denote the beginning of Stern’s obsession with the representation of the skull. Aiming to de-literalize what is in front of the lens, Stern takes a very painterly approach to photography. Also on view will be works from Stern’s “Passage” series (2002-2010), in which the artist utilizes a translucent white scrim back-lit by indirect, natural light, producing glowing, often ghost-like images. Her “Doppleganger” series (2013-2014) depicts human skulls veiled by a thin fabric; they are combined with a black scrim, and in certain instances, with another skull that has been painted charcoal. These subtle embellishments suggest expressive qualities that resist coming into full focus.

Since the late-1970s Lynn Stern has produced still life photographs in a studio environment. She creates her luminous images by using a translucent scrim, backlit by indirect, natural light. Carefully manipulating the scrim to create folds of light and shadow, she produces glowing, often ghost-like images, sometimes of the scrim itself, sometimes in combination with objects that are often partially obscured by it. She has been working with skulls since the early 1990s. These works draw from the long tradition in painting of using the skull as a focal point for reflection on mortality. Unlike many photographers, Stern has no interest in representing people, places or things, aiming instead to “de-literalize whatever I photograph – by which I mean, to de-emphasize its ‘thing-ness’ or literal presence, and create a sense of something felt rather than depicted.”

Lynn Stern has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and her photographs are included in numerous public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University (Ithaca); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Art Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum (London); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), among others.

New York, NY, October 18, 2017—Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents Synaptic Reverb, a solo exhibition of work by contemporary artist Jim Butler, showcasing a cycle of five new paintings completed over the past two years. Butler’s work centers on the question of what it means to be human in an age when boundaries between nature and technology collapse: a world of smoke and mirrors in which desire to solidly exist confronts a continually morphing biosphere.

In the paintings, figure-like apparitions congeal and dissolve as if governed by internal psychology or consciousness in the act of becoming. The DNA of these characters originates from blown glass—a material at once mercurial and fixed—with which Butler has worked extensively over the past 15 years.

Titles of works, such as Dead Eye Dick, and Stylish Woman, offer clues to the nature of particular personages, strangely familiar albeit fantastical. In a provocative formal strategy, the paintings’ highly calibrated realism allows us to experience slippage between visually specific surfaces and elusive atmospheres. The effect pushes us to wonder who and what these shape-shifting creatures are.
Explains Butler, “I sculpt figures, exploiting the material’s hypnotic optics to create visual perceptions simultaneously fluid and concrete. The result is a kind of spirit world populated with vivid personages immersed in shape-shifting spaces. I seek a kind of tenuous gravity. As imaginary portraits, the works speak to the collective anxiety of what it is to be human.”

About Jim Butler
Painter and sculptor Jim Butler (American, b. 1956) is a graduate of RISD and Indiana University. He also attended Skowhegan and Yale-Norfolk. A Professor of Art at Middlebury College since the eighties, Butler lives and works between Vermont and Brooklyn. His paintings and sculptures have been exhibited internationally for over 30 years. This includes solo exhibitions at Buchmann Gallery, Berlin; and Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm. Recent projects include a 2016 solo exhibition of painting, glass, and installation at GRIDSPACE in Brooklyn, as well as a major iteration of his ongoing project “The City Of Your Dreams,” recognized by The Corning Museum of Glass’s “New Glass Review” in 2011. He has recently been selected as a 2018 Corning Museum Of Glass Resident Artist.

In addition to his studio practice, Butler works as a curator, initiating the Flatfile Collections at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. He most recently curated a 2016 three-person show titled “False Deities” at GRIDSPACE. His full bio can be found here.

About Tibor de Nagy Gallery
Tibor de Nagy continues its significant role in contemporary American Art since its founding in 1950. In June 2017, the gallery moved to the Lower East Side, joining Betty Cuningham Gallery in a shared space at 15 and 11 Rivington Streets.

Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents exhibitions of such contemporary artists as Sarah McEneaney, Jen Mazza, and John Newman, as well artists from the Post War second generation New York School. Its long history includes the first exhibitions of Carl Andre, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Red Grooms, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. The gallery’s program continues its mission to present a broad overview of contemporary art of singular vision including recent exhibitions of Hannah Wilkie, Francis Picabia, and Jess. This unique history has also fostered collaborations between poets and artists. The gallery was the first publisher of the poems of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler.

Tyler Rollins Fine Art is pleased to present Wild State of Mind, a solo exhibition of new works by Ronald Ventura, taking place at our gallery in New York City from October 26 – December 22, 2017.

Born in 1973 in Manila, the Philippines, where he continues to live and work, Ventura ranks as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation in Southeast Asia. Over the past twenty years, his dynamically evolving oeuvre has exhibited an eclectic range of iconography and a wide variety of themes and subjects, taking formal risks that push the boundaries of image-making. The exhibition probes the intersections between reality and fiction, madness and sanity, logic and instinct, breaking down the dualities that impose a sharp divide between humans and wild animals. Ventura draws from contemporary social practices and culture, placing his hybrid creatures in scenes of merrymaking, parading, brawling, or playing sports – contexts that elicit extreme emotions but are very much part of our lived realities today. He incorporates often ominous imagery and symbols, ranging from traffic warning signs to firearms, that appear in a new kind of urban wilderness that is the contemporary counterpart to the sinister, mysterious forests of age-old legends and fairy tales.

Ventura presented his first US solo exhibition, Metaphysics of Skin, at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in 2009, followed by A Thousand Islands in 2011 and E.R. (Endless Resurrection) in 2014. A major solo exhibition of his work, Project: Finding Home, took place in 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, while in 2017 the Metropolitan Museum, Manila, presented another solo exhibition, Shadow Forest: Encounters and Explorations. Concurrently with Wild State of Mind, Ventura’s work is featured in Out of Sight! Art of the Senses at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA. Other museum exhibitions of note include: Ronald Ventura: Big and Small, Ayala Museum, Makati City, the Philippines (2015); Bulul, Ronald Ventura and the traditional art of the Philippines, Museo delle Culture, Lugano, Switzerland (2014); Watching the Watchmen, Vargas Museum, Manila, the Philippines (2012); Recyclables, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore (2012); Surreal Versus Surrealism in Contemporary Art, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (2011); A Duad in Play, ICA Gallery, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore (2010); Mapping the Corporeal, National University of Singapore Museum (2008). He was a participating artist in the Prague Biennale (2009) and the Nanjing Biennial (2010).

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to announce Brian Rochefort’s debut solo exhibition in New York, presenting new ceramic sculptures inspired by Rochefort’s recent year-long travels throughout South and Central America and Africa. The show is on view at the gallery’s 195 Chrystie Street location from November 3 – December 22, 2017.

The exhibition is comprised of 15 of Rochefort’s “craters” – large vessel-like sculptures made of glazed stoneware and earthenware. Drawing from his experience of exploring the earth’s natural beauty, this body of work is inspired by volcanic landscapes, earthen depressions, remote tropical rainforests, protected barrier reefs, and exotic animals.

Rochefort’s craters are created utilizing a process that is both additive and subtractive; each piece begins as a large unfired work that Rochefort smashes, and sometimes breaks apart, imbuing the piece with spontaneous uncertainty. The works are then submerged in mud and clay—drying and cracking to build mass—and then fired over to add color and build texture, airbrushing gradients and then using glazes; a single work can go through a process of multiple firings. Chromatically rich in color, and highly varied in surface structure and finish, these works can resemble a marine habitat or a Hubble photograph. Rochefort infuses these organic forms with otherworldly surfaces, made with glaze, ceramics, and glass. The interior space of each sculpture is made of pooled glazes and melted glass on the bottom of the work, referencing the artist’s experience visiting the Blue Hole and Actun Tunichil Muknal caves, among the sites in Belize he has visited and experienced. Rigorous investigations into process and material, Rochefort’s work pushes the formal and technical confines of the medium of tradition-bound ceramics; he expands past its limitations to new territories of freedom, invention, and play.

About Brian Rochefort
Brian Rochefort (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2007) and participated in the Lillian Fellowship Residency at the Archie Bray Foundation (2009). Rochefort has participated in group exhibitions, at The Cabin (Los Angeles, CA), Sorry We're Closed (Brussels, BLG), Retrospective Gallery, (Hudson, NY), and Steve Turner Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). He was awarded the Lillian Fellowship from the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Montana, 2007-2008. Rochefort is currently included in the museum exhibitions Regarding George Ohr at Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL and From Funk to Punk at Everson Museum of Art, NY, both 2017.

From November 2 through December 22, the Washburn Gallery will present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Hassel Smith done between 1959 to 1962 when Hassel Smith exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The only New York show of Smith’s works was held in 1961 at the Andre Emmerich Gallery although he exhibited widely throughout his life in this country and Europe.

Hassel Smith is a San Francisco “Bay Area” artist whose work in the late 50s and early 60s was strongly influenced by Clifford Still who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1940s. The Hassel Smith exhibition will include seven large works by the artist. A brochure will accompany the show with an introduction by Irving Blum. The following is an excerpt:

“During the run of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (1957-1968) we had three exhibitions of work by Hassel Smith…Although he began as a figurative artist he turned early to abstraction. I thought the work to be brilliant. Abstract, but often including a scent of the West, a part of the country that he loved. Hassel continues to be largely unknown due to his decision to live and work in Northern California. The seat of major radical art activity was, of course, New York. I am certain had he worked in New York then the work would be cherished and celebrated.”

Hassel Smith was born in Sturgis, Michigan in 1915 and died in Somerset, England in 2017. A major book, Hassel Smith, Paintings from 1937 – 1987, was published by Prestel in 2012 with over 150 reproductions, essays and chronology.

Allan Stone Projects is pleased to present Wayne Thiebaud: Land Survey, on view from October 26 – December 23, 2017. This exhibition celebrates one of the most prolific bodies of work from one of America's most prominent artists. A selection of paintings and works on paper ranging from 1965 – 2000 highlight Thiebaud’s landscape and cityscape subjects. Significant pieces include the majestic White Mountain, and the inventive city scene, Freeway Curve, both from 1995.

Along with his food and dessert paintings, Thiebaud has consistently made landscapes throughout his career. Recurrent themes of surreal ridges, looming cliffs, winding riverscapes, and vertiginous streets are derived from Thiebaud’s surrounding environment in Sacramento and San Francisco, California and his
native Arizona. With their seemingly improbable compositions, these are some of Thiebaud’s most complex and innovative works, evoking the natural wonders of Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada mountains, humble farm ponds, rolling hills and the bustling streets of San Francisco.

Thiebaud’s landscapes and cityscapes unite representational and abstract forms within a single picture, capturing the mood or feeling unique to a particular place. Although these paintings and studies are inspired by specific locations, Thiebaud heightens their experiential effects. He comments, “I’m not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape—see a pretty place and try to paint it—but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.” This is the gallery's 27th solo exhibition of Thiebaud's work.

Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona. From 1938-1949, he worked as a cartoonist and designer in California, New York and in the U.S Air Force. He attended San Jose State College (now San Jose State University) followed by Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento), where he received his BA in 1951 and his MA in 1952. Thiebaud had his first major solo exhibition in 1962 with the Allan Stone Gallery. The exhibition received critical and commercial success, launching Thiebaud's career. Allan Stone was Thiebaud’s primary dealer, friend and collector for over forty years, until Stone's death in 2006.

Throughout his career, Thiebaud has been celebrated with numerous awards and solo exhibitions. Highlights include the 1994 National Medal of Arts, given by President Clinton and a 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Design, New York. Major retrospectives were held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1985 and a traveling exhibition that went to the de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2001.Thiebaud will have a solo exhibition at the new Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum at University California, Davis in January 2018. He was a professor of fine art for over forty years at UC, Davis. Thiebaud lives and works in Sacramento.

Allan Stone Projects is the exclusive representative of the Allan Stone Collection, comprised of modern masterworks, contemporary art, tribal and folk art, Americana, and important decorative arts and industrial design. The gallery curates scholarly exhibitions, produces original publications, advises collectors, and participates in art fairs. Allan Stone Projects (formerly Allan Stone Gallery) opened in its current space in November 2013, following fifty years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Founded in 1960 by visionary connoisseur and dealer Allan Stone (1932-2006), the gallery has been admired for over half a century. Today its prodigious inventory stands as a unique amalgam in which major tendencies in Modern art can be traced and celebrated across decades